But he grew like a weed. He was tall now and getting taller by the day. Clothes didn’t last him as long as they lasted her. And he’d been having issues at school that she didn’t know how to deal with.
As a substitute mother, she was pretty much a dead bust, she sometimes thought. She loved Tad and she did everything she could to make him happy. But he got in fights and she didn’t know why. He wouldn’t talk to her about things that bothered him. He put on that sunny smile that she loved and said that she didn’t lay her problems on him, so he wasn’t laying his on her. Once, concerned, she had Cal Hollister come over and talk to him. She never knew what was said, but soon afterward, Tad stopped getting in fights and maintained a good average in his grades. Hollister, she thought, could work magic in one small boy.
Tad knew about Morris, of course. He’d only been three at the time, but he remembered Morris hurting him and knocking Clancey around when she tried to defend her little brother. He was afraid of Morris. So was Clancey. He worried, as she did, what they’d do when their stepbrother got out of prison.
Well, they wouldn’t have to face it today, Clancey thought. And if she could ever work up enough nerve to talk to Banks about it, there might be a solution of some kind. It was just that Banks intimidated her. He was pleasant enough, from time to time, but she knew that he resented her. She didn’t know why. He’d been antagonistic since her first day on the job and he’d tried infrequently to get her moved to another office. That would have been awkward, because she was the only person who applied for this job and he couldn’t find anybody else—mainly, another man—who’d take it on. So he was stuck with her.
It worked both ways. Certainly, she was stuck with him, too! Big, arrogant, irritating Texas Ranger. He was so self-contained that he didn’t even date anybody.
She knew why, of course. There was a lot of gossip about Colter Banks. He’d been in love with his best friend’s fiancée. His best friend, Mike Johns, had been a police officer over in Houston. He was shot to death in an attempted bank robbery, along with his mother. He wasn’t even on duty at the time. He’d just driven his mother to the bank.
Grace Charles, Mike’s fiancée, had mourned him long and hard. Banks had comforted her and would have loved to take Mike’s place, except that Grace suddenly enrolled with a missionary society and went to South America. She was deeply religious, something Banks wasn’t. So he lost his best friend and his love interest. His sister, Brenda, had told one of her girlfriends about it when they came to take Banks for lunch, and Clancey had overheard them talking while Banks had gone to bring the car around. Banks had asked for reassignment to San Antonio to get away from the bad memories. He seemed to have recovered. On the surface, at least.
But it wasn’t Clancey’s business. She put up with Banks because she had to, but he was too abrasively masculine to appeal to her. She’d had more than enough of belligerent men with attitudes.
SHE LOCKED UP the office and went to pick up Tad at the school he attended. They had an after-school class for students whose parents couldn’t afford day care. Not that Clancey was a parent, but she sure couldn’t afford day care!
“Hi, kid,” she teased, ruffling his blond hair. “Did you miss me?”
“Not since breakfast,” he teased, laughing. He was a tall boy. He came up to her shoulder now. He was beanpole thin and had blue eyes, like hers. He was always smiling. It made her feel good, just to be around him.
“How’d school go?” she asked when they were walking down the sidewalk.
“Better than usual,” he replied. “I made an eighty on my math test.”
“Very good!”
“And a fifty in history,” he added with a sigh.
“We can’t all be great scholars like me,” she said with a haughty smile.
“Ha!”
She laughed and pulled him close to her side. “You’ll do, kid,” she said. “You’ll do just fine. Mama would be proud of you.”
They stopped in at the dollar store on the corner to get Tad another notebook. Across the street, a tall man in a white Stetson was frowning as he watched them. Surely the boy wasn’t Clancey’s son. He scoffed at that idea. A little brother, probably. He’d never asked if her parents were still alive. He knew next to nothing about her, except that she was a pain in the neck at work.
Well, her private life had nothing to do with him, he thought as he continued on his way.
CLANCEY AND TAD walked the three blocks to the little house that they shared. It wasn’t much, just a one-story shotgun house with three bedrooms and a walled-in porch. When Morris and Ben had lived with them, the men shared the master bedroom. Clancey and Tad had the smaller bedroom. Each had twin beds of an antique sort with metal headboards. The furnishings were bare. Faded curtains, faded sofa and easy chair, and an old rocking chair where her grandfather sat in the evenings while he watched TV with Ben and Morris. There was a fireplace with gas logs, and beside it, the implements that had been used years ago when there was an open fire there. She shivered as she looked at the empty wrought iron holder where a fire poker and a metal shovel had once
